Technology is at the core of how most businesses today operate. They use it to manage everything from projects and internal communication to data analytics, reporting, and customer interfaces, among other things. So, it should come as no surprise that the right technologies can play a key role in rebranding.
After all, as anyone who has done so before can attest, rebrand implementation is incredibly complex. In order to effectively manage the process, companies must oversee a plethora of details, moving parts, and individual players. And they must do so in an orchestrated fashion, with everything falling into place according to schedule and on budget.
Technologies exist to help facilitate these activities. While these useful tools can’t replace human oversight and expertise, they certainly can help make the whole process run more smoothly.
The role of technology in rebrand implementation
In order to rebrand comprehensively and efficiently, you’ll likely need to adopt a suite of technologies to manage and optimize the various elements of your project. Typically, these tools fall into three major buckets:
- Rebrand analytics tools guide your team in making the smartest choices related to pricing, vendor selection, and other important decisions.
- Project management tools assist your team with scheduling, budgeting, risk management, internal communication, and resource and vendor management.
- Brand management tools allow you to create a single repository for all current branded assets and brand guidelines. They also help your team manage workflows and design approvals and provide for flexibility of brand expression within a well-defined framework.
As you might expect, many marketers find it overwhelming to sift through the various tools and programs on the market and figure out which ones best support their organization’s needs. Yet the success of any rebrand depends at least in part on putting together the right mix of tools.
At BrandActive, we use a core set of technologies to facilitate our work with clients. This means that our clients don’t have to manually assemble a rebrand-specific tech stack; but they benefit from the use of tools optimized for rebranding to achieve a smarter, faster, better brand change.
The BrandActive rebranding technology suite
BrandActive’s rebranding technology suite helps our clients manage their rebrands transparently and collaboratively. We’ve developed these tools over many years to reflect and support our expertise as rebrand implementation specialists. Our portfolio of technologies includes the following tools.
Rebrand Analytics Engine (RAE)
Our proprietary Rebrand Analytics Engine (RAE) provides rapid insights to drive our clients’ rebranding budgets and decisions. This unique tool forms the powerful core of our rebranding technology suite. It acts as a repository for a broad pool of historical rebranding data from every project we’ve worked on over twenty-plus years. This includes detailed information such as which assets were rebranded, what it cost, who the vendors were, and the quality of their work.
RAE’s historical benchmarking data enables us to make realistic pricing predictions and put together multiple cost scenarios for our clients. For example, the cost of rebranding a company’s signage involves much more than just the cost of designing and manufacturing new signs. RAE takes every piece of the process into account — the cost of design, technical survey, prototyping, permitting, manufacturing, installation, QA, electrical work, shipping, and so forth — to provide a more accurate estimate. Using RAE, we can also assemble various cost scenarios that leverage different factors, such as the quality of signage in different locations across multiple sites.
We can access benchmarking data based on factors such as industry, so we know which classes of branded assets to include in estimates. We can also segment pricing by geography, as average costs to manufacture and install fleet vehicle branding may be quite different in the New York metropolitan area than it would in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Finally, RAE also includes a vendor database with information about every vendor we’ve worked with, including information about quality of work, and other assessments.
Survey Manager Express (SME)
Another tool we use on rebranding projects is our Survey Manager Express (SME) tool. We use this tool at the very beginning of our engagements, during the discovery phase. This tool helps us to quickly get up to speed on what a client’s branded asset portfolio consists of.
Many of our clients are global, with offices and production sites spread across multiple locations. Of course, it would be impossible for us to visit every individual site and manually inventory all the branded assets. Instead, we do site inspections at representative locations, and in some cases, equip representatives at remote location with our SME inventory tool.
During these initial visits, we photograph and document all branded assets in use at those locations. For example, using this process, we capture all the different types of signage on a client’s property, including the signs’ location, designs, and so forth. We use this information to build out a profile of an organization’s signage. We can then import this information into RAE and start putting together various scenarios for signage transition strategies and costs—and assure our clients of highly accurate results.
Rebranding checklist | Over 150 branded touchpoints
Is your company in the midst of a rebrand or planning for one? Our free rebranding checklist is a great way to start to scope what is involved with a initiative like this.
Finally, we take the information in our SME and use it to support the development of signage recommendation books. This shows clients a before and after view of what their rebranded signage would look like in situ with new branding elements in place.
Issues, actions, decisions log
Our proprietary IAD tool is used to track and document all issues, actions, and decisions associated with the rebrand project as they arise. It is collaborative and transparent and allows project team members to document new IADs and check the status of existing items in the IAD log.
The IAD log is instrumental to every phase of work in a rebrand project. It keeps the full team on the same page. In addition, it helps new team members quickly orient themselves if they come on board the project midstream.
Online help desk
We urge our clients to start using our online help desk tool as soon as possible after revealing their rebranding plans to the internal team.
Whether you decide to rebrand to sharpen your positioning or in response to an M&A, spinoff, or divestiture, your staff is sure to have lots of questions. They will want to know what will change and when. And they will need to understand how those changes will impact them and the jobs they perform.
Our online help desk tool acts as an information-sharing resource for your entire organization. Team members can peruse previously answered FAQs and submit new questions to be answered. The help desk also uses meta-tagging to triage questions by forwarding them to the appropriate recipient so they can be answered quickly and accurately. In some cases, answers to common questions can even be generated automatically.
Recommendations for a brand management system
Brand governance is key to consistent branding at any time. But when brand change happens, it becomes even more crucial. It will take time for your staff to get a firm grasp on how your new branding is to be deployed. A brand management system keeps everyone in your organization on the same page during the transition. It creates a single source of truth for brand guidelines, including permissions structures and information about how and when to use specific elements and templates. Also, it enables your brand to respond effectively to ever-changing business conditions, organizational strategy, and consumer behavior.
We encourage our clients to leverage a third-party brand management system that meets their needs. These tools can vary significantly in terms of features and pricing, so it’s important to do your homework.
If you need help determining your specific needs for a brand governance infrastructure and matching them to available systems, BrandActive can help.
The technology you choose for your rebranding project will play a significant role in how you implement brand change. These tools can’t replace expertise, but they do augment and support it in critical ways. Interested in learning more about RAE and the rest of our rebranding tools? We’d love to talk.
